Last days on the Street of Shame
My brief stay there was bathed in ink, beer and gossip
I was in Fleet Street the other day and it brought back so many memories. Just looking at the view down to Ludgate Circus and St Paul’s beyond it, took me back to a golden age in my career when I worked, albeit for a period of exactly six weeks, in what hacks still refer to as the Street of Shame.
Our office was known as the Black Lubyanka, after the Cold War headquarters of the KGB, but this building was home to one of the greatest newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s, The Daily Express.
The title was known worldwide, so much that it featured extensively in the feature film, the Day the Earth Caught Fire (1960). Even today, it is not bad for a B-Movie and the real-life editor of the newspaper, Arthur Christiansen, had a cameo role.
